‘Everyone now uses AI’: chemistry students share how and why they’re using AI tools

However, some researchers worry that relying on AI tools might stop students developing key skills, such as critical thinking and issue solving. A recent study found that nearly 30% of science, methodology, engineering and maths (Stem) dissertations submitted in the US this year contained AI-generated text. This is a sharp increase from just under 2% in 2023 when ChatGPT became publicly available. Those behind the work noted that AI is ‘displacing a possibly crucial portion of the work through which scientific expertise is developed’. And earlier this year, the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) – an independent education thinktank in the UK – released the results from a survey of over 1000 full-time undergraduate students on how they’re using generative AI (genAI) tools. The survey found that over 95% of students applied AI in at least one way, which has increased from 92% and 66% in 2025 and 2024, respectively. Additionally, 94% of students said that they applied genAI to help with assessments – up from 53% in 2024

Chemistry World spoke to several students about how genAI has been changing learning and how and why they’re using AI tools.

Dion Josh, a second-year chemistry undergraduate student at the University of Oxford, UK, says that he mostly uses AI agents to break down concepts so that they are easier to understand. He says that this works well to inorganic chemistry, which often relies on learning trends and facts, however notes that using AI tools to figure out organic interaction mechanisms is trickier. To overcome this, Josh often resorts to asking several AI agents the same question. ‘I [also] ask it to show me it’s working and ask it to reason through why the interaction is taking place,’ he says.

Josh highlights how using AI tools during his degree has also made his tutorials greater useful. ‘I don’t have to ask the little questions that I don’t need a professor to,’ he says. ‘It’s only the really intense questions that I don’t know – that AI can’t teach me – that I need the professors.’

Trawling through and summarising recent research literature is ripe to using AI tools. However, Ellie Yates, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, UK, working at the intersection of materials chemistry and plasma medicine, notes that she often finds using these tools to such tasks unhelpful. ‘While it can be good to a quick search to get a list of topics to research yourself, it does greater often than not create lots of “hallucinated” answers which could lead your research in the completely wrong direction if you’re not careful,’ she says. Yet, Yates recognises that ‘AI agents are improving rapidly’. ‘It’s essential to students and researchers to remain AI literate, understanding both the capabilities and the limitations of these tools rather than just ignoring or avoiding them.’

Yates also worries that students are using AI tools to help with written assessments like lab reports. ‘Students need to be very careful that they don’t miss out on the opportunity to refine their writing skills during their degree,’ she says. ‘I completely understand that writing lab reports can be very time consuming and difficult to do [however] it is a very crucial skill which, especially when it comes to how you analyse data, shapes how you think as a scientist.’

Yates says that she tries to consumption AI tools ‘relatively sparingly to prevent becoming dependent on [them]’.

Meanwhile, Jasper Butcher, who has just finished his PhD on protein design in Nobel laureate David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington, US, says he uses AI tools ‘to everything’. He primarily uses Anthropic’s Claude to generate code and run experiments as part of his research. ‘I would say there’s a really positive perspective to some of this work where it’s helping us do good science at a faster rate,’ he says.

AI tools have also helped Butcher to develop issue sheets to his students. ‘I had so much fun building them because all of a sudden I could put together greater creative problems to people to solve with much less effort,’ he says.

Reflecting on his time as an undergraduate, Butcher thinks that AI tools will have changed the way that students now collaborate. to him, working with his peers on assignments ‘made the whole experience shared’ and that it was ‘so satisfying to get through [assignments] together’. ‘You couldn’t really do [a degree] alone in some ways,’ he adds.

He feels that students might now be ‘one-shotting’ their degrees – working in isolation with an AI agent, rather than with other students. ‘That’s a real shame,’ he says.

‘I’m personally very fortunate to be in a situation where I have had to [as part of my studies] sit with really difficult problems,’ he says, adding that the skills needed to do that now ‘feel harder to synthesise’.

Fraser Scott, who researches chemistry education at the University of Strathclyde in the UK, notes AI consumption is ‘rife throughout undergraduate all the way up to PhD student’. ‘[AI] has emerged very rapidly – too rapidly to educators and education institutions to respond to adequately,’ he says. ‘I think the response [so far] has been focused greater on safeguarding assessments rather than understanding or promoting genAI as an education tool.’ In the Hepi survey, less than half of students (48%) felt that they were being taught how to consumption AI efficiently, despite greater than 68% agreeing that these skills are ‘essential’ to ‘thrive in today’s world’.

‘As educators, just as we’ve got a responsibility to teach our students how to consumption a textbook appropriately or a calculator appropriately, we need to teach them how to consumption genAI appropriately,’ says Scott.

He also points out that educators often have strong opinions about students using AI tools ‘however I bet every single one of them uses it very regularly themselves’. ‘There’s this sort of dichotomy of consumption,’ he says.

‘It’s just how much they’re leaning on AI, rather than are they using AI or not,’ Josh says. ‘All the undergrads that I’ve spoken to don’t understand how anyone’s got through university without AI because that’s what we entirely rely on.’